"neuroscience" entries

How neuroscience is benefiting from distributed computing — and how computing might learn from neuroscience.

When we think about big data, we usually think about the web: the billions of users of social media, the sensors on millions of mobile phones, the thousands of contributions to Wikipedia, and so forth. Due to recent innovations, web-scale data can now also come from a camera pointed at a small, but extremely complex object: the brain. New progress in distributed computing is changing how neuroscientists work with the resulting data — and may, in the process, change how we think about computation. Read more…

Play is how our passions find us. Play is where failure isn't failure and isn't emotionally charged. Play is all about iteration and we iterate on the emerging questions that arise from within us and that we are driven to understand. With the Fun Theory Award, VW has sponsored a competition to award creative examples of changing behavior by making functional fun.

Draw closer around the flickering firescreen, and hear four tales of brains, words, medical improvement, and the sharp ache of the wisdom teeth of the future poking through the soft gum of the 21st century as diagnosed by Dr Sterling.

Mind Bites – Flickr set of findings from neuroscience on top of beautiful photos. Mind candy meets eye candy.

Dr Johnson’s Dictionary – the original dictionary of the English language, reborn as a word a day blog. Love the old citations, e.g.

A’DAGE. n.s. [adagium, Lat.] A maxim handed down from antiquity; a proverb.
Shallow, unimproved intellects, that are confident pretenders
to certainty; as if, contrary to the adage, science had no friend
but ignorance. Glanville’s Scepsis Scientifica, c.2.
Fine fruits of learning! old ambitious fool,
Dar’st apply that adage of the school;
As if ’tis nothing worth that lies conceal’d;
And science is not science ’til reveal’d? Dryd. Pers. Sat. i.

Peter Provonost – prevented untold infections in hospital procedures by instituting a simple checklist. This is a long article, but worth reading as it shows how to institute change. He was diligent, scientific, and worked with the teams instead of against them. For more like this, read The Best Practice: How the New Quality Movement is Transforming MedicineThe Best Practice by Charles Kenney, a fascinating look at the quality movement in healthcare.

Bruce Sterling’s State of the World 2009 – I’m just skipping through reading Bruce’s responses. Some fabulous zingers that make me look forward to his presence at Webstock in February: “The Americans
don’t have a place to offshore their money. They can offshore their
LABOR, that’s dead easy, but their money? If the American dollar goes,
finance as an industry gets the blue screen of death.. On urban reinvention: “Suppose you found some dead James Howard Kunstler strip-mall burg,
bought it for a dollar, and turned it into “OpenSource-opolis” where
every possible object and service was creatively commonized. Would
that be heaven, hell — or what we’ve got now only different?” On netbooks + cloud slowing the upgrade cycle: “I’ve been a computer “consumer” for decades now, in the sense that I
follow the trade press and buy computers regularly, but I dunno: if a
$300 netbook running freeware lets me get the job done, 2009 may be the
year when I just plain vanish off the radar.”. Oh forget it, as is always the way with Sterling every damn sentence is quotable—go read the whole thing yourself and enjoy.

David Brooks gave a talk last week in Aspen that inspired me and that I can't stop thinking about. Note that it comes in three parts. His book is due to come out in the fall of 2009. Brooks discusses an intellectual revolution that brings together neuroscience, sociology, psychology, behavioral economics, genetics, and a variety of other fields in an…

At ETech, I had a fascinating conversation with Marie Bjerede, VP and General Manager of Qualcomm's Portland Design Center. She was telling me how the threads we'd brought together at ETech had validated her own thinking and helped her bring together her private passions and her professional life. I asked her to write up our conversation, and she agreed. Here's…